Benchmarks for ATI's TRUFORM Technology?

SanLouBlues asks: "I'm slow and still deciding on what video card to get, but it's caused me to wonder what the performance of ATI's TRUFORM n-patching is like. I've heard plenty of subjective comments and seen the pictures, but despite my best efforts, no benchmarks. I would hope that similar benchmarks would be available for GeForce3s since I believe ATI claims that n-patching is part of DirectX."

Look up GL_NV_evaluators

[shofmann]

NVIDIA's GeForce3 does have a similar technology, which they use to implement DX8's npatches. In OpenGL the functionality is exposed through the GL_NV_evaluators extension, as demonstrated by the "bumpy shiny patch" demonstration program in the NVIDIA SDK [nvidia.com].

Just because a card provides hardware support for a feature (such as npatches) does not mean that the software (eg games) that you're using is utilizing that hardware. I do not know of a single shipping title that's currently using npatches, and the GL_NV_evaluators extension was only released to developers a year ago. I would not consider addition or elimination of hardware support for npatches to be a deal-breaker when deciding what video card to buy, unless I was planning on writing software myself that utilizes that feature.

It's been my experience that the NVIDIA drivers are superior to the ATI drivers. I've been using an ELSA GLADIAC 920 GeForce3 board in my workstation for a year now, with the NVIDIA drivers, and have nothing but praise for both the hardware and software. I have had problems with the software drivers for the ATI RAGE LT Pro in my laptop computer.

driver support required

[mallan]

I'm assuming you want to run the card on Linux, giving you're posting the question to Slashdot...if that is the case, you need to wait for better ATI drivers.

The NVIDIA Linux drivers come from the same codebase as their Windows drivers. The drivers offer the same features and comparable performance to their Windows counterparts. The lastest driver release also added a few nice GLX extensions. All hardware features are exposed.

The current ATI drivers were written as part of the DRI project, not by ATI. They do not expose any features beyond what you would have found in a Rage128 (no T&L, no programmable pipelines, only 2 texture units, no cube environment maps, no 3D textures, etc.). There have been rumors floating around that T&L will finally be supported in the Radeon driver "soon", but this is only a rumor, and I've been hearing it for well over 6 months.

ATI's website claims that their FireGL 8700 and 8800 cards (Radeon based) will have Linux support, which is promising. But never, ever, ever, ever purchase a product based on promises. If it doesn't have what you want now, don't count on ever having it.